FCC ISSUES SIGNIFICANT RULE CHANGES

Um, Larry? Answer the question. I didn't ask if any crypto companies had filed key generator patents. I asked why your name isn't on any of the patents that Dakotek held.

How, precisely, does that qualify you to understand the dispatch function, or, as you claimed, the psychology of dispatchers?

Not to put too fine a point on it, Larry, but there's nothing related to emergeny communications in having been a ham and a TV engineer. (Unless you count participating in EBS drills.)

 

Quite happy to.

http://www.sfmuseum.net/oakquake/2.2.html

QUOTE:

"A. Personnel and the Physical Environment

Full EOC staffing as specified in the Emergency plan became apparent that the major area of concern was the Cypress collapse. Some staff section, i.e. situation analysis and resources were not activated. Response to the EOC by departmental managers took some time. This was apparently the results of the amount of time required to comprehend the extent of damage. No complete telephone recall was attempted. The Staff that did respond during the initial 10 hours was adequate to staff the EOC.

In the initial hours, volunteer agencies and the utility companies were important to the effective functioning of the EOC. The Red Cross began opening shelters for earthquake victims and initiated canteen service for first responders. The phone company installed additional phone lines to the EOC. Amateur radio volunteers set up backup communications, in case the EOC lost either phone or radio communications. "

UNQUOTE

There are also press reports in several papers, some of which were quoted in QST.

One wonders WHY you are so intent upon discrediting the efforts of others.

 

Apparently you're not familiar with either California, or who the hams in the audio tape were. Here's a hint: They weren't operating as RACES.

Gee, Larry, guess which area of the country? That's right, California. And guess which California counties adopted ICS as their basis for all local incidents? That's right Larry, Santa Clara county is one of them.

Well yes, the keyword here being slowly.

But Larry, please explain to me why you're bringing up NIMS, which was initially put together in the mid 1990s, in the context of an event that happened 4 years earlier?

Obviously you don't know the geography of the area. Sunnyvale is part of SPECS, not part of San Jose Prepared (the umbrella for San Jose RACES.)

Did you, by the way, listen to the Palo Alto tapes? On several occassions, the question was raised, and answered in the negative, as to whether or not the served agencies had called out SPECS. (Which is not RACES, by the way.)

Um, no, Larry. The proper number of calls into a disaster area is: no calls per day.

And if you can't explain why to your wife, then I question your ability to do emcomm or disaster relief.

I'm surprised you listened to HF nets. All of the major media were on the scene very quickly and the nightly news carried live reports from all of the damaged areas except downtown Santa Cruz.

 

Actually, I am wondering why my significant and clearly illustrated qualifications and experience are being derided and questioned by those with no apparent experience or qualification in emergency management or emergency communications.

It appears that these people choose to deny every amateur involvement in and/or contribution to EMCOMM. This shows both bias and a total lack of knowledge on the subject.

If the RACES structure is not working in your area (no evidence of this in San Jose), FIX IT. If people need training, TRAIN THEM. If they won't get trained, GET RID OF THEM. If they will not submit to city or county background checks to receive a city or county ID, you DO NOT want them.

Operationally, if nobody knows where the antenna lead is:

Why isn't there a RADIO there ?

Why isn't it tested at least once each month ?

Why did the person responding not have or use a back-up antenna ? (I put one city hall / EOC on the air by running my 100 feet of RG-58 across the ceiling and out a side door to my car, and used my mobile antenna. In another city, I used my magnet mount base along with the 100 feet of RG-58 and my mobile antenna to mount an antenna on the roof flashing of the city hall / EOC. The magnetic base and 100 feet of RG-58 are ALWAYS in my vehicle -- along with a spare antenna, power cables, spare connectors, and tools -- as a part of my "Go Kit".)

Lack of training and lack of preparation are the fault of the LEADERSHIP -- not the members.

 

That's Oakland Larry. And "backup", "in case", in Oakland is a long way from your original claim that

Here, by the way, is the city's "lie"

It's funny that you mention Oakland, San Jose, and Sunnyvale in defense of your claims about San Francisco but you've not once shown anything that contradicts the "liars".

Actually, let's quote some more from that Oakland report that you liked so much:

in fact other than the comment you quoted, there's no mention of hams.

Why do I respond to self-agrandizing claims by ham whackers?

Well, you've just provided a good example. In order to build your ego up, you called the city of San Francisco's emergency professionals liars, when they told no lies. You made up a story about a relief effort at SFO that didn't happen, and now you're desperately posting URL after URL that you pretend supports your case but that continues to demonstrate how tiny the role of hams in Loma Prieta really was.

Do yourself a favor Larry. Get a map of the bay area. Look at where the real problems during Loma Prieta occured. Notice that in all of those areas (Oakland, near the Cypress structure; San Francisco, in the marina district; Santa Cruz, downtown) hams played no role.

Then actually listen to the half hour of audio tape from Palo Alto. Find the locations mentioned on a map. Notice how far they were from the actual action. Check the reports. Notice how little happened in the SPECS served area.

Then come back and I'll tell you what the other 700,000 people in the south bay were doing during the half hour of that audio. I'll tell you about the guys who pulled their cars over and directed traffic at those downed stoplights, so that people could get home quicker; rather than "reporting" it. I'll tell you about what it was like going through buildings in the dark looking for any victims that might have been unfortunate enough to get hurt. I'll tell you about rigging a phone that wasn't attached to a wall powered pbx so that it could dial out and arranging for people to be able to make calls to let their families know they were OK and find out how those families were doing.

If you're really lucky, some day you'll meet someone who had to deal with the horror in downtown Santa Cruz. Maybe they'll tell you about the bad part of the quake, not about some random hams in the undamaged areas playing 'emergency communicator'.

But you know what, Larry? None of them will ever call San Francisco's pros "liars" because they didn't make ham whackers look good.

 

Um, Larry? Being a ham, doing field service for a long defunct crypto company, and being a tv station dude doesn't qualify as significant emcom experience. Neither does sitting around Texas during a tornado season in Witchita. And accusing San Francisco city officials of being liars? Nope, not that either.

Oh, there's plenty of evidence of problems in San Jose RACES, but you're not going to be able to see them from Texas. By the way, didn't you get the memo? RACES is last year's model. ARRL ARES™ is this year's boy.

And the local SEC is the biggest problem in the area, so it's fairly hard to fix.

You have no idea how ironic that statement is around here.

 

From one who has been there: AMEN!!

 

wa5ben:

Your qualifications don't prove what you say is true or false, what you say proves *itself* to be true or false.

It is what you say that determines whether people believe your qualifications mean anything or not.

From trying to say that adding and mixing two signals are the same thing, to trying to mislead people into thinking wideband OFDM is actually narrowband technology because you define a symbol as consisting of 18 tones instead of one tone, to making claims that email is the best communication tool in an EOC, what you *say* doesn't engender much confidence in your qualifications or in your experience in these areas.

On the other hand, what you say about cryptography makes a lot of sense. It *affirms* your qualifications in those areas.

Appeals to authority are just one more argumentative fallacy and that is what you are doing in quoting your "qualifications".

If people don't believe what you say, then look to what you say for the reason why, not at the people who don't believe.

tim ab0wr

 

Alas, not even that.

Larry comes across as having been tangentially involved in a crypto company some time ago and still remembering the marketing literature he was familiar with, but his knowledge in the area seems to be firmly rooted in the early 1980s.

I could go into the differences, but Bruce Schneier would have to shoot you if I did.

 

"Tangentially" my *** ! I have addressed the national cipher committees and crypto authorities of more countries than most people have ever been to. The questions one receives from those guys and gals are not "soft". They are pointed, quite technical, and extremely well thought out. The least educated person in the room usually has at least a Masters in advanced mathematics. If you try to BS them, they will chew you up and spit you out -- then have you kicked out of the country.

Can you say that you sat down with the head of state, the second in line, and/or the Minister of Foreign Affairs / Secretary of State, with the intelligence chief, and with the commanders of the military branches in about 38 countries ? I seriously doubt it.

Choose to disagree, but please do not slander either my abilities or my hard-earned and quite well-deserved reputation. The hardware changes, but the fundamental principles of Cryptography do not change. The Datotek KG still fare quite well against modern supercomputer attack. That is not the case for PGP or any other software implementation -- regardless of the number of bits in the key.

(The break time for properly implemented DES was last reported as under 3 hours, by the way. MANY DES implementations suffer from short cycling that reduces break time to a fraction of that.)

 

That must be why you try to BS us by passing off seccond and third hand accounts as fact while they are easely proven to be false.

 

Please do not confuse California's problems with the close cooperation and common efforts of city and county officials and hams in the other parts of the country.

If an EOC is activated, we are expected to send someone to man it.

When the city or county or international airport does a disaster drill, hams have specifically assigned roles.

When an actual crash occurs (DFW has had only two -- both by Delta, and both because of pilot error due to hurrying to stay on schedule), hams are cleared to the site -- including the triage areas around the runway, if the crash is on the airport. Other hams are dispatched to the hospitals to control the casualty loads versus available resources.

Our efforts free fire fighters and police to do their jobs. In some cases, we have been asked to sit all night in a tornado damaged area and report any movement. While there, every cop who came by said thank you. (One even brought donuts ! ) They were free to patrol and respond.

We work as a part of a team. Each member of the team is trained in his/her job role(s), and each knows the limits of their role(s). Fire fighters fight fires, do rescues, and provide emergency medical care. Police negotiate the peace and enforce the law.

Our field units assess situations within our training (weather, HAZMAT, damage) and communicate to the appropriate agency(ies) or role(s). Our EOC person (there is one in the EOC of each city) gets each field report to the correct role(s), and communicates EOC questions and concerns to the field.

Our National Weather Service operators communicate information from the lead forecaster (or hand him the microphone, as several are now hams), and ensure that the forecasters receive field reports in a timely manner. The forecasters evaluate our reports and decide if a warning should be issued. We quite often hear "based upon your reports, we will issue a warning for ..."

The meteorologists at all of the network affiliate television stations monitor our frequencies and quite often break to warn their viewers even before the NWS warning has been broadcast. The words "ham radio spotter", "SKYWARN amateur radio spotter", and "trained spotter" are very often connected with these warnings -- both from NWS and from the TV stations.

If your RACES or ARES does not work like that, it simply is not working as it should.

 

There's no such thing as a "Masters in advanced mathematics," Larry.

That would make two of us, then, wouldn't it Larry? Neither you nor I have sat down the head of state of 38 countries. Heads of state, even in third world countries, don't do the shopping for crypto gear. That's what they have all those "Masters of advanced mathematics for."

Of course, I could be wrong. Why don't you list all 38 heads of state you met with?

Dakotek gear may or may not do well against attack. Given that you didn't design it, you don't work there any more, and you certainly don't have the clearances necessary to know if anyone has even bothered to run an attack on any of the Datotek gear with modern brute force methods, though, I wonder how it is that you would know.

I'm sure you did a fine job hooking up Datotek's gear to the local phone systems, Larry, but that's hardly doing crypto.

By the way, I've been going through Datotek patents and you still haven't explained why your name isn't on any of them if you were such a player in the field as you claimed.

You ever going to answer that question?

 

Oh, I don't. California has different problems than the rest of the country. But, as I've said, except for some small groups in the south east, the rest of the country has pretty bad problems as well.

I hope you don't mind, Larry, if I don't believe any of that, but you've got a consistent track record of being wrong about what I can check.

Which describes something like 90% of the ARES and RACES in this country.

In the US, one finds, typically, one of the following to be true:

There's no ham activity at all.

There's whackerdom at large.

There's an ARES/RACES grudge match in progress.

There are a bunch of nice folk who mean to do well but simply don't have a clue.

In about that order of probability.

That is the reality of ham EMCOMM in 90% of the US.

 

Not just US, we are alowed to do third party trafic in case of emmcom for a few years and we see it too here, only the grudge match is between those wanting to involve local radio stations and unlicenced radio services (CB PMR/FRS) and those wanting to keep it pure hamradio.
The wackers here are so far limited to trying to gain grands before they even have proved themself but I'm sure we'll see badges stickers and other wanabe cop stuf